Word around the water cooler is suggesting that Microsoft has made a very large cash offer to Capcom to make Resident Evil 5 a timed exclusive for the Xbox 360. How much money and how long the exclusivity will last is unknown.
Something like this honestly wouldn’t surprise me. We all know Microsoft dropped $50 million on Rockstar for the exclusive GTA4 DLC which hasn’t materialized yet. Just how big do they thing RE5 is going to be? Is it worth that much cash to secure it for the 360 for a couple months? Microsoft has some deep pockets. We’ll see what happens when E3 rolls around next month.
In a major change of heart, Kaz Hirai has said that Sony may consider paying for third party exclusive titles for the PS3. Microsoft has been practicing this method since the first Xbox came about, while Sony has held its stance that it just isn’t necessary. But the times they are a changin.
King Kaz let the info slide in an interview with Three Speech. When Phil Harrison joined Sony way back in the day, he enacted the policy of not paying for third party exclusive titles. Now that Phil jumped ship to Atari/Infogrames, it might be time to revisit that policy. The PS3 has had a less than stellar start and there haven’t been many good third party exclusive titles on the system. Paying for some might sell more consoles and bring Sony back into the fight here in North America where they’re trailing Microsoft in the console wars.
We’ll see what happens over the rest of the year if this does occur and if it pays off for Sony.
August 21, 2007 – 2:18 pm
Payoffs have existed in all industries for a very very long time. You can’t argue they exist, but do they do any good for the end user?
The most recent gaming related payoff centered around Microsoft and Rockstar, with a $50 million purse headed to the developer for the exclusive rights to publish two episodic packs for Grand Theft Auto IV for the Xbox 360. Many can argue this is good for gamers, but I disagree. This is good for Microsoft, and that’s about it. Rockstar will still sell the same number of copies of GTA4 with these exclusive packs as opposed to the downloads being available for multiple platforms, it’s just now the majority of copies will be for the Xbox 360. And what about the price paid? All of Take Two’s games sold on Xbox platforms have not totaled $50 million in gross sales, so how can one justify that cost? Will these downloadable episodic content packs cost gamers an arm and a leg? If history repeats itself, they very well just may.
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